Triple Entendre: Furniture Music, Muzak, Muzak-Plus

Chapter 2. Muzak Incorporated

chapter 2 Muzak Incorporated I’m not going to reform man because he is not reformable. I’m going to reform the environment.2 —Buckminster Fuller Of all the arts, music possesses the greatest power for social organization.3 —Arseni Avraamov Muzak Proper In the beginning was the word, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as follows: Muzak (also erron. Musak): “The proprietary name of a system of piped music for factories, restaurants, supermarkets, etc.; also used loosely, with small initial, to designate recorded light background music generally.” Muzak “proper” owes its name to General George Owen Squier (1865–1934), a chief signal officer in the United States Army who, in 1922, founded Wired Inc., a company “employ[ing] electric power lines to transmit news programs, music, lectures, general entertainment and advertising directly into private homes.”4 In 1934, inspired by the catchy, popular brand name of Kodak, Squier himself renamed his company Muzak. Since then, like “Vaseline,” the brand name Muzak has eased itself into the vernacular language to become a common name denoting an entire genre of music. True to its Kodak-inspired origin, the name muzak has become a powerful Figure 2.1. Muzak Logo “The planned music service” in Muzak ad in Fortune (February 1957), “How Much is Worker Tension Costing your Company?” muzak incorporated 47 and adaptable cliché. It serves equally well in belittling a composer (“the sound you make is muzak to my ears”5 ) and in expressing contempt for the “mindless art” deriving from Clement Greenberg’s formalist canon (“visual Muzak”6 ). More than anything else, muzak defined itself in the sheer impact of a word bearing powerful resonances, no matter how controversial they may be. From early on, one essential function of Muzak has been to project a strong, convincing image, and the 1934 rebranding of the company already served this purpose. Image, in this context, does only not mean “picture”; it refers to the evocative connotations associated with the watchword muzak. Simply uttering the word thus triggers the pacifying images of “[feeling] more relaxed, contemplative, distracted from problems.”7 One may be seduced or terrified by the prospect, but Muzak succeeds in subjugating its proponents and detractors alike. Whether they aim to promote it or condemn it, interpretations of Muzak overwhelmingly subscribe to the premises of its efficiency. This clearly indicates that, in order to be effective, Muzak needs more than just to be implemented. It requires, above all, a collective suspension of disbelief. It is in the formulation of a persuasive concept, designed for a society meant to be shaped to its image, that Muzak can be characterized as an artistic endeavor. After all, stressed Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko in the 1940s, wasn’t it the primary task of the artists to subjugate their viewers? “It is our function as artists,” they famously declared, “to make the spectator see the world our way—not his way.”8 The following study of muzak is primarily an inquiry into the formation of the discourse (the set of beliefs, solidified in a doctrine) out of which Muzak and muzak emerge. For an artist like John Cage, it was Muzak’s power to project the powerful image of a reformed society to come that constituted an object of competition, not its music. In the second half of the twentieth century, Muzak presented itself as the most successful form of “environmental music.” Responding acutely to what John Cage defined as his musical ideal, one could say that it has been perfectly integrated into “the rest of our life.”9 Whenever we encounter Muzak , “[it] flows through channels parallel to those providing air, electricity and information.”10 An ideal image of Muzak resembles the double blank page of Marshall McLuhan’s and Quentin Fiore’s 1967 book The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. It is easy to miss its caption, printed in a small typeface and running on the upper edge of the page: “Environments are invisible. Their groundrules [sic], pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.”11 Regardless of its sophistication, a critical consensus surrounds Muzak: it is bad. Despite the company’s relentless efforts to improve or simply 48 chapter 2 to correct its image, the reputation of Muzak remains frankly disastrous. Even specialists in marketing, who could be expected to be sensitive to the product, feel compelled to condemn it. Most recently, Alan Bradshaw...